Persian
Introduction
Note: On this page the word Persian is used for the language spoken by inhabitants of Iran. The language is also referred to as Farsi, which Wikipedia calls an
endonym According to Wikipedia, an endonym is:
"... is a common, internal name for a geographical place, group of people, or a language/dialect, that is used only inside that particular place, group, or linguistic community in question; it is their self-designated name for themselves, their homeland, or their language." of Persian.
Persian is an Indo-European language which was strongly influenced by Arabic following the Arab conquest in the 7th century. It is spoken as a mother tongue mainly in Iran, but also in parts of Afghanistan, Russia and India.
Alphabet and orthography
The Persian alphabet is a variant of the Arabic alphabet with additional letters. It is written from right to left with no capital letters and with clear rules for how to join letters. Typically, @ the first difficulty for the native speaker of Persian when learning to read and write English lies in the unfamiliar Latin script. ~
Punctuation is sparser than in English. But punctuation, as well as paragraphing, seem to be approximating to the English style, especially in newspapers.
Phonology
Persian has more consonants than English but only about half as many vowels and diphthongs. This means than Persian speakers may find it difficult to perceive or correctly articulate those latter sounds in English. For example:
- bit /ɪ/ may be pronounced as beat /iː/
- bad /æ/ may be pronounced as bed /e/
Problems articulating consonants or consonant clusters include
- then /ð/ may be pronounced as ten /e/
- place may be pronounced as pelace
- straight may be pronounced as estraight
Stress in Persian is predictable. In multi-syllable words it usually falls on the last syllable. Persian native speakers may struggle with the unpredictable stress-timed nature of English.
Grammar - Verb
There are some tense differences between Persian and English that may cause difficulties for learners. For example, the present simple can be used in Persian for an action currently taking place, unlike in English where the progressive aspect is needed.
- *What do you do? (read: What are you doing?)
A similar tense error results from the fact that the simple past tense in Persian can be rendered in both the past simple and the present perfect in English. This results in the choice of the past simple when generally The past simple is more common in American English in such contexts than in British English. the present perfect is used:
- ?I lost my key. Can you help me find it?
@@ In common with the speakers of many other languages, Iranian learners of English have problems with questions and negations. ~~ There is no Persian equivalent to the English auxiliary to do. So mistakes such as the following are frequent:
- *Why she did that?
- *He not like meat.
Persian generally expresses the question tag with Na (no). So it is not surprising to hear utterances such as:
- You are coming to the party, no?
- She bought a new phone, no?
English modal verbs are another predictable source of difficulty. Persian tends to express the range of meanings associated with the various English modals (e.g. must, ought to, have to need to ) by a single modal. This makes it difficult to choose the appropriate English modal for the given context.
Among the other verb grammar problems facing learners are the changes required in English indirect speech. Interference from the Persian language often results in ungrammatical utterances such as:
- *She asked have you eaten yet? → Correct is She asked if I had eaten yet.
Finally, @@@ phrasal verbs do not exist in Persian, so problems in understanding them and using them correctly are inevitable. ~~~ (There's a page on phrasal verbs elsewhere on this site, where readers can convince themselves of the severe difficulty of this aspect of English - and not only for Persian learners.)
Grammar - Other
There are no equivalents in Persian to the definite and indefinite articles in English. This leads learners to omit the article where it is needed, use the wrong article or insert an article where it is not needed. Following is an example of each of these errors respectively:
- *Can you play guitar?
- *I need the new phone.
- *Do you like the rap music?
Word order in Persian typically follows the SOV (Subject-Object-Verb) pattern, which differs from the standard SVO pattern in English. Furthermore, adjectives normally follow their nouns and adverbs are commonly inserted between subject and the object.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, Persian beginning learners of English may struggle to construct sentences that conform to the typical English order of sentence components.
Vocabulary
Although Persian is in the same Indo-European language family as English, it does not share many of the cognates available to German or French learners of English, for example.
Many English words entered Persian during the later decades of the twentieth century. However, a large proportion of these words have been translated into Persian following the Islamic revolution. So Iranian learners of English do not enjoy the considerable vocabulary acquisition advantage of their Western European counterparts.
Information sources
On the introduction page to this section of the website you can view the sources of the information on this page.
Further thoughts
Click the button below to read the reflections of a Persian native speaker on what he or she considers the main differences between English and Persian.
Word order: Although the Persian has the pattern SOV in its sentences, but it does not cause any severe problem in learning English for us, and it can be considered as a problem only for totally newbies. In addition, the pattern SVO specially in informal usages is not very uncommon in Persian as well.
Regarding yes/no questions, in Persian you only need to add the word "aayaa" at the beginning of a sentence, and word order would not be changed. In wh-questions, if wh-pronoun" refers to the object of the sentence, the word order would not be upset again! So as a general rule, in Persian we do not change the structure of our sentence in making up questions.
Morphology: Persian and English follow rather similar patterns and structures in making up words. Of course, compared to some other languages such as German I consider them to be more different, but what I meant to say, was that the root of words(peculiarly verbs) does not change and is not broken in both language. The usage of prefixes and suffixes and other means of extending a root is common in Persian in a similar way, and this facilitates the process of translating a (usually) technical term from English to Persian, and at the same time obtains some kind of "language sense" when a Persian speaker faces a new English word, which he already knows the meaning of the parts of it.
What I am talking about is true about many of non-technical words as well. For example consider the word "moonlight" in English. The Persian word would be "mahtaab" which consists of mah(moon)+taab(present participle of the verb "to light"). The only exception in Persian when the root of a verb is broken or rather does not convey a regular pattern, is the difference between present and past participles in Persian. But again, we have a rather similar situation in English too. Although it is not common between linguistics to divide the Persian verbs into two groups of regular and irregular classes, but still, maybe more than half of the Persian past participles are obtained from their present participle by addition of a "id" at the end of the present participle.
Verb grammar: Regarding tenses, the following list is included the tenses in English which does have a Persian equivalent. There are of course some differences in usage of some of these tenses, but it would be so tedious and irrelevant to mention them in detail!: past simple, past perfect, past continuous, past imperfect (I used to), present simple, present perfect, present continuous and future simple.
There are some Persian tenses that does not exist in English (which are not relevant to our current discussion). But regarding the other side, there are of course some difficulties. Iranians tend to make some mistakes in usage of some tenses such as future perfect (simple version is used instead), future continuous (simple version is used instead), present perfect continuous(present perfect is used) and some others as well.
Grammar - Article system: In contradiction to some opinions, Persian does have a definite article(actually a way to making a noun definite, not a real separate word as an article), when it comes to informal and colloquial language. For making a noun definite in this version of Persian, we add a simple "e" at the end of the noun. For showing the indefiniteness of some noun we can both use the word "yek"(one) before the noun or add a "ee" at the end it. But unfortunately, specially the definite article in Persian does not show the exact characteristic of its English counterpart.
The most important difference that I can think of it right now, is that we do not consider unique objects as definite in Persian, i.e sun, moon, earth and so on. Actually, we only use definite articles when we want to refer to a special instance of some class of objects like men, birds, books and so on. I am sure one can find some other differences as well.